


John Can't Come to the Phone Right Now

by telm_393



Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV)
Genre: Cuddling & Snuggling, Delusions, Established Relationship, F/M, Hallucinations, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Mental Health Issues, Mild Hurt/Comfort, Past Child Abuse, Post-Season/Series 05, Psychosis, Recovery, Sleeping Together
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-15
Updated: 2020-08-15
Packaged: 2021-03-06 07:27:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,954
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25909585
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/telm_393/pseuds/telm_393
Summary: John Constantine contends with a demon. Zari Tarazi provides back-up. In a way.(Note: this demon is not real. Not as such. They still contend with it.)(Note: it's a bad night, but it would've been a great night not too long ago, so somewhere in this story there is a victory.)
Relationships: John Constantine/Zari Tarazi
Comments: 10
Kudos: 65





	John Can't Come to the Phone Right Now

**Author's Note:**

> The background for this is that I was thinking, “hm, how about John's whole thing where he doesn't have a phone but make it dark," and this isn't exactly that, since I wouldn’t even call it dark, but...it's sure something, and I thought I'd share. :) 
> 
> Also, extra warning: John's not suicidal, but there’s a voice that wants him to be, and it makes that clear in passing.

It’s dark in Zari’s room and John doesn’t know how long he’s been awake. What he knows is that it’s still time to sleep. It’s still what passes for night on the Waverider when they’re in the temporal zone. 

Obviously, John isn’t sleeping.

John’s least favorite demon has been much quieter lately, almost silent during the day and if not silent eminently ignorable, but nights are still tricky and on this night John wakes up sticky with cold sweat and with a sick feeling of dread, and the phone starts ringing.

John’s breath catches in his throat and his body itches with anxiety. The voicemail is objectively better than anything not confined to the landline and its answering machine, but he still doesn’t want to hear it. It's been days since he's heard it so clearly. 

John should get out of bed. He should leave so that the phone doesn’t wake Zari up. But it won’t, he reminds himself. Instead, he’ll wake her if he gets up, because his body is flush against hers, so close that he’s surprised he hasn’t woken her anyway with his heart beating like it is against her spine.

He stays as still as he can and forces himself to breathe and look at the outlines of things in the dark and feel Zari, who’s sleeping peacefully.

The phone is only getting louder. John thinks it’s coming from under the bed. He closes his eyes. It's definitely coming from under the bed.

He should get up. His damned little hanger-on will wake Zari, and she’s not a good sleeper, and—no. He will wake her if _he_ gets up, he reminds himself, or reminds himself again, if he did before, because Zari can’t hear the phone. John’s the only one.

The phone isn’t real. His useless mind is just playing tricks on him, is all.

He breathes evenly and presses his forehead against Zari’s soft hair. He closes his eyes. He’s not going to get any sleep, but he can stay still and peaceful. He can make sure not to wake her. She has nightmares, and his own nonsense has been keeping everyone up for months now. 

The phone keeps ringing. John feels sick with the waiting. Maybe it’ll just be the phone tonight. Just the ringing ad infinitum. He can live with that. He’ll live with that. It’s not as loud as it was. John shouldn’t think about it so hard. If he thinks about it too hard, it’ll become real. 

The ringing cuts off, and John feels no relief, because he knows the sound of the phone going to voicemail. 

“Sorry,” a pleasant robotic voice that sounds a lot like the one that was in Zari’s phone (before John may or may not have definitely made it explode) says. “John can’t come to the phone right now. Please leave a message.”

John stays very still. It’s just voicemail. He’ll let the demon with no name do his rambling until he gets bored and goes away. The messages don’t leave the phone these days, and John’s starting to learn how to ignore these things again.

_Beep._

“Hello, John. Guessing you’re not very interested in picking up the phone. That’s okay.” It's true, John isn’t interested in picking up the phone, and he wouldn’t be able to pick it up anyway if he was, which he isn’t, because he can never find it. It’s why he doesn’t try anymore. Usually. “I already know what I’m going to tell you. I bet you know too.”

John bets he has an idea of it, yeah.

“You’re miserable. You’ve always been miserable. You know what you should do, John? You should _die._ Now you’ve got your soul coin, who knows where you’ll go? Master of your own fate, John, master of your own fate.”

That’s not relevant. John bites the words back. _Ignore it, ignore it, ignore it,_ he chants to himself. Not out loud.

 _When logic and proportion have fallen sloppy dead_ , John thinks fleetingly. The first time this happened, after he was released from hospital to Natalie and ended up living with her and Alex and little Astra for months, Natalie would sing him “White Rabbit” when he was sleepless and scared, “Scarborough Fair” having long since stopped being their song. John was scared most of the time, then, and he still goes back to “White Rabbit” when he wants to banish things that, he reminds himself, _don’t exist,_ one of the few coping mechanisms his therapist has approved of since the beginning, and he should sing, maybe...

He loses his train of thought before he can grasp what it was that he was trying to remember to do, fading back into the real world and the demon with no name’s voice.

“You should leave, shouldn’t you?” the demon with no name drones on. “You don’t deserve all this. All you do is hurt people. All you do is break things. Remember how you broke time? That's why you're like this. No one but yourself to blame.”

John feels a spark of worry before he reminds himself that he didn’t. Break time, that is. Not this time. The flashes of different timelines in his head are normal, the flashes of different realities, of Highcastle, all of that's normal, at least for the Legends. He’s not the only one who remembers, just the only one it seemed to affect quite so dramatically, though the memories of his deaths give Behrad panic attacks now, poor sod. 

But the point is, _the point is,_ that it wasn’t John’s fault as such. He helped save the world. Helped save the world, got his soul coin, got a new team, got a new life, avoided breaking time. 

(Something else broke, though, a complex fracture that had never quite healed in his mind. Not with the meds he stopped taking, not with the shock therapy he probably shouldn’t have bullied the doctors at Ravenscar into giving him and the injected medicine he eventually stopped too, not with the blind luck that let him mostly function without falling to pieces like this for years. It’s not crazy, really, that adding some pressure made it, made him, _snap._ He already knew that he didn’t take well to multiple timelines, after all.)

“You’re miserable, you’ve always been miserable, he’s always been miserable. Don’t you agree, Thomas?”

John’s eyes open wide and he holds his breath. Dad. Dad’s home. Dad’s going to open the door. John can’t believe he forgot. John clutches at the sheets. They’re very soft. So is Zari’s hair. He’s got his forehead pressed against the back of Zari’s head, which is how he knows that, and the sheets he’s grabbing are wrapped around her too. 

He’s not a child anymore. Dad’s not here. It’s just the demon playing tricks. 

“Hey, Killer,” Dad’s voice says, that familiar sneer that just loves following John around. “What are you gonna do to make up for what you did to your mother?”

He would’ve burned himself with a cigarette, before his teammates knew. He would’ve burned himself and usually Dad would go away or get quieter. Take the punishment, Johnny, and he’ll bugger off. John can’t do that anymore. He considers punching himself in the head, but it’s apt to both wake Zari up and upset her, so he holds off. 

John feels a wave of nausea, but it might be the medication. 

“Listen to me, boy!” Dad nearly screams, and a convulsive jolt of panic runs through John’s whole body.

He scrambles out of bed, climbing over Zari, who wakes up with a start. 

“Not so loud, not so loud, you’re making a scene and you know—you know, don’t yell at me, don’t you yell at me, you wanker,” John mutters, kneeling in front of the bed. He clenches and unclenches his fists. “Don’t you yell at me.” He takes a deep breath and bends down to look under the bed. Nothing. He lies down on his front, ready to crawl under it. “You can stop now. You can stop putting him on, I know he’s not there…” John trails off, nothing left in his head but a long wall of liquid questions before he comes back and ah, there it is. There he is.

“Hey, Killer, Killer,” Dad sneers like he’s calling a dog, and John hated it when he did that and he still hates it even when Dad's just an echo.

“Fuck off,” John mutters. “Leave me alone.”

He Marine-crawls his way half under the bed and, in the extremely limited amount of room he has, looks around. Nothing. He needs a flashlight. Zari’s phones have flashlights, but she keeps her phones on silent and far away from him ever since he, well. Did, in fact, explode one. (Which thankfully didn't end their relationship in homicide, given that Zari has several phones and an enormous amount of back-ups of everything she has on each one, but did make for a bit of a rough patch.)

Under his breath, he says an incantation and snaps his fingers. Fire sparks at his fingertips before he thinks twice and puts it out even though he hasn’t had a chance to use the light to look around. Zari’ll kill him if he singes her carpet again. 

“John?” Zari asks from above him. “John, come back to bed, come sit with me.”

John shakes his head. “Sorry, love, I have to find it…” He blinks hard. It’s dark. The demon with no name loves the dark. John loves the dark too, loves to hide in it. He loves the dark, just not right now. 

“Is it the phone?”

“Yeah. Thing’s driving me mad. Just mad.”

“John,” Zari says. “You’re not going to find it. Come back.”

John sighs and wriggles out from under the bed to kneel beside it and actually face Zari, who’s giving him a somewhat rueful look. He feels a pang of guilt. 

(It’s a bad night, isn’t it? It’s a bad night, but then again, just a couple of months ago it would’ve been an _amazing_ night, a night they could only dream of, so this might be a victory.) 

He should explain. He’s probably already explained, but he doesn’t think he has tonight, so he says, “I can’t sleep.”

“Okay, take a deep breath,” Zari starts, and John cuts her off with a groan.

He rolls his head back, asking the ceiling for patience. “Been doing nothing _but_ taking deep bloody breaths.” John jerks his head forward, scrubbing a hand through his hair. “I want him gone and you lot won’t let me at the cigarettes anymore.” 

“Oh,” Zari says. “Your dad?”

“Yeah, my dad. Demon decided he wanted him to, to gatecrash the fucking message.”

“John, come lie down with me. It’ll all go away eventually.”

“I want him away _now,”_ John says, close to whining. 

“John,” Zari responds a little tetchily. “There’s nothing there. You’re wasting your time, so just. Just come back to bed.” 

“Oh, what the hell do you know?” John snaps defensively, a brief surge of annoyance making the words sound nastier than he intended. 

Still, between Zari’s words and his own, it’s getting hard to hear anything but...what actually exists, he reminds himself. 

He gives Zari a searching look. Her dim outline in the low light is entirely recognizable. Zari runs a hand through her hair and shakes her head, taking her own deep breath. “Hey, Gidget? Turn on the lights.”

And on the lights go, just as Dad tells John to listen to him and John decides to not do that. It’s probably late. There are dark circles under Zari’s eyes, John notes, now that he can see her more clearly. Now that he can see everything more clearly. 

John remembers that he was thinking about how he didn’t want to wake Zari up, earlier. He didn’t want to wake Zari up by getting out of bed, because she can’t hear the phone or any of the nonsense that comes with it. Naturally, he failed, and now she’s tired because of him, sometimes he can't believe she's not just tired of him, and he wants to slap himself across the face, but he clenches his fists instead. 

“I woke you up,” he mutters. “I’m...sorry, love.”

Zari shrugs and gives him half a smile before the curve of her lips turns mischievous. “I’ll forgive you when you come back to bed,” Zari says, wheedling, and John lets out a fond huff of laughter and sits back on his heels. 

“I’ll be home soon, Killer, better run,” Dad snarls, and John flinches, though he's imagining things, probably. He’s just imagining things. But if Dad is coming home, maybe John can go ahead and hide under the bed outright, like he used to. 

“No,” John tells himself. “I’m not a bloody child anymore. Don’t be ridiculous.” 

He’s breathing heavily, and Zari says, “John.” Her voice is loud and sharp. Her voice is familiar. It is impossible to not attach it to her. She says, “Look at me.”

He does. 

There are dark circles under her eyes. She's tired. John was thinking, earlier, that he didn’t want to wake Zari up, didn’t want to wake her up not with the phone but with his pointless chasing after it, and he says, “Ah, bollocks. I was trying not to wake you up. I’m...I’m sorry, love.”

Zari’s expression flickers with sadness, but then she rolls her shoulders back, as if shaking it away, and says, “I’ll forgive you when you come back to bed.”

John huffs out a fond laugh and keeps his eyes on Zari, who smiles at him as though she can't help it. He loves her smile. He loves how she smiles at him, how she looks at him like she's seeing a person she wants and not some miserable broken thing. 

“Hey, Killer, Killer,” Dad sneers from the answering machine, and John clenches his jaw and shakes his head. “Hey, Killer, Killer,” Dad says again, but he doesn’t seem to have anything else to say.

John takes stock of the situation like he might take stock of ingredients for a potion, and makes sense of it.

All the sounds he can’t see are still coming from under the bed, everything from the phone is still coming from just under the bed. The phone didn’t used to be just under the bed. It used to move all over the room, all over the ship, back when things were really bad, and John’s not sure why the phone wouldn’t be roaming about if it were actually here, or if he thought it were actually here. 

John sighs and slumps a bit. “I’m not gonna find it,” he mutters to himself even as the demon with no name says something he doesn't bother to make out. “He’s not here, it’s not. Real.” He looks up at Zari. “You don't hear _any_ of it? _”_

She shakes her head. “No. Nothing.”

“No phone, no voicemail. No demon. No Dad.”

“No phone, no voicemail, no demon, no Dad,” Zari agrees, and John nods. He looks at her for a while longer, cocking his head. She cocks her head back, and it makes him laugh, which makes her laugh, and after a beat, he finds that the voices have faded. 

It's so much easier than it used to be. It used to be that they’d only get louder, back when they weren’t confined to the phone, back when the breathing things hiding around the ship would wake up with no regard to time of day, back when John would spend entire nights beside himself in the library talking nonsense while the others tried to calm him. 

“It’s just you and me,” Zari tells him. 

All things considered, that seems about right.

“I believe you,” John decides. 

“I’m touched,” Zari responds, her tone dry but the words genuine, and she makes a grand gesture at the bed.

John concedes and climbs back on, letting her pull him down beside her. 

She doesn’t ask Gideon to turn off the lights and he’s quietly grateful that he won't have to ask her to keep them on. John hasn’t needed the lights on like this in a while, but he lets the shame go for the time being and just watches Zari for a moment, watches her be real and with him.

He and Zari are facing each other, and John presses his forehead against hers and puts his hand on her hip. She puts her hand on his shoulder and squeezes, and they fall into silence. She closes her eyes, and he watches her feign peace, and the phone begins to ring. 

John flinches, sucking in a pained breath through his teeth, and Zari is still pretending to sleep, but John feels her body tense. John closes his eyes and curls in closer to Zari as if she can protect him somehow--and maybe she can--and begins to hum. 

Zari doesn’t feel quite so rigid, though she does sigh a little, but John’s occupied.

_One pill makes you larger, and one pill makes you small...and the pills that Mother gives you don’t do anything at all...go ask Alice, when she’s ten feet tall._

“And if you go chasing rabbits,” Zari murmurs, and John’s lips curve up, “and you know you’re going to fall...tell ‘em a hookah-smoking caterpillar has given you the call…” 

“He called Alice,” John whispers along, nearly lulled to sleep, “when she was just small.”

It’s calmer now. In this room, in John’s mind.

He sings through the rest of the song and, after that, sings it again, just in case.

**Author's Note:**

> “White Rabbit” is, naturally, the song that John is singing at the end of “The Virgin Gary.”


End file.
